Many organizations use enterprise resource planning systems and other business computing systems to manage business methods and transactions. These systems often have different modules and components directed to different business functions, such as accounting, logistics, marketing, sales, and so on. Over time, many organizations may change, upgrade, replace, reorganize, or add new functionality to these systems, modules, and/or components.
One option for adding, changing, or replacing functionality in these systems would be to replace the existing systems with new systems that include the added, changed, or replaced functionality. During this replacement operation, the organization's customized settings and configuration changes to the existing system would be overwritten with the default set included in the new system. However, many of these business computing systems include thousands and even hundreds of thousands of customizable settings. Overwriting even a fraction of these settings each time a system functionality change is implemented would require the organization to re-invest time and resources to implement the same or similar customizations. Such a result is inefficient and undesirable given the high initial costs and resource requirements to initially implement the customizations.
Another option would be to add any additional functionality independent of that previously included the existing system. In this option, the additional functionality would be added as an additional option to that provided in the existing system without changing any of the functionality, configuration, or customizable settings in the existing system. A system administrator or other user would then manually reconcile the configuration and setting customizations implemented by the organization in the existing system with the additional functionality added to the existing system. This option is also impractical and undesirable given the thousand of configuration settings that may require manual reconciliation.
The inventors perceive a need for an automated framework enabling new or changed computing system functionality to be integrated into existing computing systems while minimizing unnecessary configuration changes to the existing systems.